Concerns with Startup Tools / Hosts

[Hootie10]

Hello,

I've recently had some problems with trojans (since cleaned with SpyBot) on my machine and whilst looking through the Startup Tools section on SpyBot I clicked on the 'Hosts' tab and noticed dozens of entries in their with what appears to be different web addresses, eg. 007guard.com, and most show an IP address of 127.0.0.1 and are located under \Window\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. My question is this, can anyone tell me what they are and should I be concerned about them? I've struggled to find out any info on this so I thought I'd try SpyBot's forum.

[tashi]

Hello Hootie10,

whilst looking through the Startup Tools section on SpyBot I clicked on the 'Hosts' tab and noticed dozens of entries in their with what appears to be different web addresses, eg. 007guard.com, and most show an IP address of 127.0.0.1 and are located under \Window\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. My question is this, can anyone tell me what they are and should I be concerned about them? I've struggled to find out any info on this so I thought I'd try SpyBot's forum.

The hosts file could be described as an address book. While the normal user is accustomed to access other computers on the internet using names (for example security.kolla.de), every computer is accessed by a numeric address at a lower level. You may already have seen this numeric addresses; they look like 127.0.0.1 for example.

http://www.safer-networking.org/faq/hosts-file/

127.0.0.1 is an IP address that always points back to your own machine.

By adding lists of known ad networks and Spyware sites into your hosts file and mapping the domain names to 127.0.0.1 those sites are blocked, unable to be reached. It's a layer of protection.

Hope that helps.

[Hootie10]

Hi Tashi,

Many thanks for that, it all makes sense once it's been explained.... just glad I didn't panic and delete them all. Thanks again,.

[tashi]

Cheers.